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Report from Washington Keystone XL Protest

Above is an interview with Bill McKibben conducted just prior to yesterday’s Washington protest. TransCanada is a major villain here, as McKibben’s account makes clear. We now live in a world where Alberta oil interests, facilitated by the Harper government, have decided to make a leading contribution to the destruction of the global environment because it is profitable to do so. The amount of tar sands bitumen extractable on a daily basis is considerably less than one-twentieth of America’s daily needs, but producing it — that is, separating the tar from the sand — makes it the most toxic and environmentally dangerous oil in the world. As NASA’s James Hansen has put it, the large scale and long term production of Alberta tar sands means it’s “game over” for the climate.

Below is an email reporting on the Keystone XL protest yesterday at the White House that I received from McKibben.

Friends–

There are days along any journey that stick with you, and today was one of them.

Under blue Indian Summer skies, more than 12,000 people from every corner of the country descended on Washington DC; then, with great precision, they fanned out to surround the White House and take a stand against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Here are just a couple of pictures from the day, and you can see lots more by clicking here.

What speaker after speaker today made clear (and they came from every part of our movement: indigenous leaders, labor organizers, environmentalists, young people, preachers) was that today was in no way a grand finale — there’s lots more work to do.

I have no idea how this battle is going to come out — only that, together, we stand a chance to shut down this dirty pipeline and shift the flow not just of oil, but of history. This day was an important part of that history, and we’ll carry its power with us as we take this fight forward.

Thanks in advance for all the work we’ll do together, shoulder-to-shoulder, on the road ahead.